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By participating you will not only be helping university students, you will also get to express your opinion and compete with others to show that you have the most accurate prediction."

So basically, participating gets me bragging rights. But who would I brag to? In any case, I think this study is a simple 'wisdom of the crowds' experiment and they should just come out and say it. "helping university students" is a poor reason to participate. Most places when they do a "count the number of pennies in the jar" game, offer to give the jar to the person with the closest answer. So... where's the jar?

When someone cries judicial activism about the court ruling with the constitution it's whining.

When a judge writes laws from the bench it's judicial activism.

You will usually hear cries of judicial activism when the supCt rules against someones sacred cow. The 14th is a good example. It freed everyone from some state tyranny not just them Negroes and boy does it still burn some.

When someone cries judicial activism about the court ruling with the constitution it's whining.

What I predict is that the SCOTUS will ignore the fact that the question before them is "is mandating that people buy a product constitutional?" and void the entire act, despite the fact that several parts of it have already gone into effect without the mandate and those parts are doing just fine and would continue to do fine with or without the mandate.

Getting rid of haveing ERs have to treat all comers regardless of ability to pay will not help the people to sick to get insurance or people with insurance that get sick and get dropped or the insurance comes up a BS way to get out paying. Also it may even lead to people going to jail just to get to a ER.

21,000 people have pre-existing condition insurance as a result of the bill, Obama said it would be 375,000 in the first year alone. When the creator of the bill was off by more than an order of magnitude, do you really want the rest of the bill to go into effect? I do not consider a failure of that magnitude to be "doing just fine." I predict that they will not find the individual mandate unconstitutional, as the SCOTUS has a vested interest in Federalism.

What I predict is that the SCOTUS will ignore the fact that the question before them is "is mandating that people buy a product constitutional?" and void the entire act

Huh? You do realize that SCOTUS isn't just ruling on the mandate, but on several issues concerning the whole legislation, right? While the mandate is being considered on it's own, they reason they might toss the whole act is because of something called "severability". In English, Congress wrote the bill explicitly so that it's not severable, i.e. if you void one part you have to void the whole thing. The bills authors did this for a reason; they gambled that if the bill was written this way, future Congress

In English, Congress wrote the bill explicitly so that it's not severable, i.e. if you void one part you have to void the whole thing.

That's not correct. In fact, the default for a law is that it is not severable. The reasoning is that the Supreme Court won't declare a portion of a law unconstitutional, because the remaining result would be a law that congress never voted for. Imagine, for example, that the social security tax were declared unconstitutional, but that the social security benefits weren't.

Man, I've gotta say, you may have labelled me as a "foe" here, but holy crap I agree with you 100% here. Speaking as someone who considers himself a "moderate leaning Libertarian" (yeah, I know, it's hard to pin any such things down, it's always case by case) in many areas, I've taken a lot of crap from various associates for agreeing with the kind of position you just outlined. Oh well, I'll keep taking the crap whenever it's offered, and rebutting their arguments that make zero sense on a national scale.

Yeah, but look what they have gotten away with thus far. No way they'll ever actually roll back that Commerce Clause interpretation. It's the equivalent of asking them if they want to be political scapegoats for the rest of their lives.

They rolled back the commerce clause when they nullified the Gun Ban in "school zones" by telling Congress they stretched the definition of commerce too far. They also rolled it back some when they said Congress can not force states to create storage facilities to dispose of nuclear fuel.

If James Madison (author) and the rest of them had intended the Congress to have power to regulate all commerce, then he would have written that in the document. But instead he specifically carved-out an exemption: commer

They rolled back the commerce clause when they nullified the Gun Ban in "school zones" by telling Congress they stretched the definition of commerce too far. They also rolled it back some when they said Congress can not force states to create storage facilities to dispose of nuclear fuel.

And then they went and blew whatever gains they had made by declaring that pot grown in your own backyard for your own personal use is interstate commerce.

And then they went and blew whatever gains they had made by declaring that pot grown in your own backyard for your own personal use is interstate commerce.

Alas for pot growers everywhere, there has long been precedent for this.

Specifically, Wickard v. Filburn, back in WW2 (when the feds really got into this "we control everything" phase they've been in all our lives), which dealt with a man growing his own wheat to feed his own chickens.

The justification there was that it would have an effect on the interstate (white, gray, or black) market and thus they could regulate it. This ruling wasn't that much different from the Wickard v. Filburn [wikipedia.org] case in 1942 where the US government had established limits on the amount of wheat a farmer could grow but Filburn was growing more. He argued that the additional wheat he was growing was for his own use on his farm and thus was not entering the interstate wheat market thus could not be regulated. The co

Wickard v. Filburn represents the beginning of the "commerce clause means we can do anything" justification. And really, the Filburn justification isn't any more of a convoluted and twisted bit of logic than the Gun Free School Zones Act logic was.

Of course there is: An activist judge is a judge that makes a ruling which creates a precedent I don't like.

Funny, but no. An activist judge is one that makes a ruling which creates a precedent which conflicts with prior rulings regarding the same laws at the same or higher level within the judiciary. In other words, one who rewrites well-established precedents.

Sometimes activism is a good thing; the older precedent may well be flawed. However, it is not something to be undertaken lightly. It creates uncertainty and undermines the accumulated legitimacy of the court, as the conflict implies that at least one of the rulings—and any others based on it—was in error.

Law is higher than court precedents. Laws are passed by the People through their duly-elected representatives/delegates/senators. If a judge (or group of judges in appeal or supreme courts) thinks the law says ABC, then he should rule ABC, even if former precedents said XYZ. We are a republic where the Law is the ruler above all else.

BTW I think the Supreme Court's questions about what ELSE Congress could mandate, like purchasing solar panels on roofs, or hybrid cars, or Bluray players (to support the mu

The precedent of judicial review [wikipedia.org] was something that the US Supreme Court created for its self in 1803 in the Marbury v. Madison [wikipedia.org] case. Before this there was a fair amount of debate amongst the framers of the constitution as to whether this right should be granted to the court, but it was not one of the powers given to the US Supreme Court. One of the lesser known clauses in the constitution is that the congress has the ability to regulate the US Supreme court so it congress wanted they could in theory pass a

Law is higher than court precedents. Laws are passed by the People through their duly-elected representatives/delegates/senators. If a judge (or group of judges in appeal or supreme courts) thinks the law says ABC, then he should rule ABC, even if former precedents said XYZ. We are a republic where the Law is the ruler above all else.

I'm not disputing any of that at this point, though the relationship between the civil law and the will of the People is problematical at best. However, people depend on the stability of the law, including its interpretation. The inertia of precedent aids that stability. Reinterpreting the law and overturning precedent amounts to declaring that the prior rulings were flawed, a claim which requires substantial public justification.

Health insurance applies to everyone, since it's difficult to live without some kind of health.

Hmm..so, how did people ever survive before the concept of health insurance came into being?

I was under the concept that health insurance was a fairly modern thing.

Actually...best thing to do, is make people more responsible for their own care. Make it easier to set up HSA (Health Savings Accounts) which are not use it or lose it, like FSA's are....and let people sock away money pre-tax, to be used on routine c

An activist judge is one that makes a ruling which creates a precedent which conflicts with prior rulings regarding the same laws at the same or higher level within the judiciary. In other words, one who rewrites well-established precedents.

Sometimes activism is a good thing; the older precedent may well be flawed. However, it is not something to be undertaken lightly. It creates uncertainty and undermines the accumulated legitimacy of the court, as the conflict implies that at least one of the rulings—and any others based on it—was in error.

I wouldn't call that an activist judge as long as the judge is well and truly ruling according to the spirit and letter of the Constitution. I would say that activist judges are those that rule deliberately in spite of the wording of the Constitution. Finding a new new right not mentioned in the Constitution is a good example of this. I wholeheartedly agree that overturning precedent should never be taken lightly, but no matter how many years a precedent has, if it's in opposition to the Constitution, send

Funny, but no. An activist judge is one that makes a ruling which creates a precedent which conflicts with prior rulings regarding the same laws at the same or higher level within the judiciary. In other words, one who rewrites well-established precedents.

This makes the assumption that a group of justices can never make a mistake or be forced to judge incorrectly because a complaintant poorly articulates his case. It also assumes that new information or circumstances cannot present themselves which alter the perceptions of a law. And it precludes the possibility that manipulative people (whether they be lower judges, politicians, or even law enforcement) could use a law in a way in which it was never intended for illigitimate purposes.

Say what? The POTUS yesterday went on a rant that accused the Supremes of being activist is they shot down Obamacare. The dittohead/fox news crowd does NOT think this. What I find amazing is the fact that the president is a)so immature as to be upset that someone may strike down a law he really likes, b)does not seem to understand the system of checks and balances we have in the USA.

Dunno, Ginsberg shows signs of "Social Conscience" and seems happy projecting it on the populace. Seems to distract her from constitutional matters, that's so important at her advanced age and dementia.I doubt they're any more activist than their benefactors told them to be.

The more likely aspect is to load the court with more members that are pawns; the president has used that threat before.

Which is why an appointee has to be approved by the Senate. And getting pawns appointed is very difficult even when the President's party has a super majority (as we have seen recently). Just adding more justices is not an option, FDR tried that and got slapped down.

In the US system, judges are guaranteed to write laws from the bench. That's how judicial precedent works. Either go to a common law based system (the French have that, so that means it's a commie-coward approach to writing law), or suck it up.

The French do not use the Common Law system. They use the Civil Law system, which is derived from the Napoleonic Code, which is derived from the Code of Justinian, which actually dates from well before the fall of the Roman Empire.

The United Kingdom uses the Common Law system.

The United States uses both. The federal system uses Common Law, as do most of the states: but Louisiana in particular uses a Civil Law-based system, in keeping with its heavily French heritage.

I don't see that either one is clearly superior. If you take a look at what comes out of Louisiana state courts, you'll see they're just as crazy as any other system. It's just crazy of a slightly different flavor. You might think that flavor tastes better, but I don't.

The United States uses both. The federal system uses Common Law, as do most of the states

Actually, it's debatable whether SCOTUS is a common law court. Everything in the federal court system below SCOTUS is certainly common law, with the wide lattitude and power that those judges have. But SCOTUS is somewhat different. Scalia argues that the court is not really common law in practice [utah.edu], as when a case comes before the US high court, the only standard is "does this contradict our written Constitution?". If it does, even if it has a basis in common law, then the justices are supposed to toss it. SC

The intent of the founders was to have a rainbow and unicorn filled utopia where bunnies hopped gaily through the meadows and nobody would ever so much as think of violating the supreme law of the land, as evidenced by the fact that there is absolutely no mechanism in the consitution to punish or even fix violations of it, and the SCOTUS had to take over that last part on their own.

the majority literally found the right to abortion within another right to priva

You don't need to have a central monetary authority to have a bubble based on creation of fake currency if fake currency can be created by anybody anyway. It's perfect, it's as if everybody had their own printing press.

Thank you for demonstrating the obvious truth that markets don't need a government authority mucking with them to create instability. That roman_mir guy sure needs to open his damn eyes and... wait...

You don't need to have a central monetary authority to have a bubble based on creation of fake currency if fake currency can be created by anybody anyway. It's perfect, it's as if everybody had their own printing press.

Thank you for demonstrating the obvious truth that markets don't need a government authority mucking with them to create instability. That roman_mir guy sure needs to open his damn eyes and... wait...

Current Slashdot cookie:

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example. -- "Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"

That happened after the bubble had already formed and then burst, you idiot. The free market did not prevent the bubble from forming, it did not prevent it bursting. People who aren't ideologically blind call that a failure of the free market, yes.

This obviously isn't you. You don't appear to realize that having an ideology does not free you from the constraints of reality. As long as you can't separate the two then you're just crazy and there is no point to anything you say except for some measure of

Tulips are perishable goods, with a very long growing period, and a low rate of reproduction. They were considered valuable precisely because not everybody could grow them at will. That's why your analogy with printing money breaks down.

Second: people were trading options (yes, derivatives, oh my) on the futures
market, and then government came out with a law that allowed people to drop
contracts and only be liable for 3.5% of the value. You don't see how that
can create a problem that later can be blamed on 'free market', where in fact
there was no such thing again?

If the law considers a contract partially or fully unenforceable, then anyone entering into such a contract nevertheless is ignorant and a sucker. Why are we expected to believe that markets of such people are good at predicting things? Are they secret masochists?

By the way, 80 years of war, I always was wondering who in their right mind
would fight wars for 80 years without government actively promoting them.

Off topic, but quite simple really. In the 17th century, most soldiers were mercenaries, whose motivation was money and pillage. Fighting wars was a career choice, basically, and soldiers frequently switched sides whenever their current employer was defeated, lost interest or didn't pay enough. It's best to think of them as criminal gangs terrorizing large parts of Europe.

The recurrent crashes and bubbles on Wall street are unrelated to markets, they are related to the government's ability and willingness to attempt and control the economy and money supply (inflation). There wouldn't have bee a housing bubble and even Internet bubble before it without artificially low interest rates. There wouldn't be another major collapse in the future (bonds, dollars) without the Fed either. Does it have anything to do with the markets? Not much, not until the signals stop being mingled by the governments.

The first known bubble occurred in 1637 over tulips, when the US federal government was still considered a very remote possibility.

You shouldn't have.

You see, I will explain to you something that hopefully will put this to rest.

Tulips are grown at will, they are nothing more than Federal reserve notes without the Federal reserve. They ARE paper.

You don't need to have a central monetary authority to have a bubble based on creation of fake currency if fake currency can be created by anybody anyway. It's perfect, it's as if everybody had their own printing press.

Fed has a monopoly on that (well, that and fractional reserve, but mostly Fed, god knows how many tens of trillions they've been pumping into the world's economy if only in one year that was revealed showed 15 of them).

Read this closely, kiddies: this is your brain on free-market cool-aid.

The great depression happened AFTER the creation of the FED. Prior to the FED the American economy was characterized by booms and busts. The thing was they were short and shallow. 2-5 years up than two down. Post FED you have first the GD and lately these 10-20 year cycles that ruin the entire productive period of some citizens lives. Government intervention thru the creation of the FED has been harmful to the generational equality of the nation and that is before you even start to discuss the national

Markets aren't good at prediction, any more than anything else is. What they are excellent at (and in fact the best tool known to man) is identifying a legitimate price between buyers of a particular product at a particular point in time.

The site seems to be a waste of energy when alternative sources exist with a much greater volume of activity. The prime example that comes to my mind is the Iowa Electronic Markets [uiowa.edu]. I understand the Big Ten rivalry, but why reinvent the wheel? Do they honestly expect to get valuable commentary in conjunction with the votes?

There aren't that many possibilities, really. The scotus can toss it out entirely, let it stand, or remove just some parts of it. They aren't going to rewrite it (that's not their job). Similarly they can't just make their own law in its place. Any other proposed solution is likely even further from the realistic possible outcomes.

Hence the notion of "most accurate prediction" is rather absurd in this case. You get it right, or you don't. The options essentially boil down to A, B, and C. If you a

These guys have been doing this for years, and it's meant for lawyers and other legal eagles to participate. They have a very good success rate and have markets for all the cases that are being heard. The participants are people in the know, which makes their predictions more reliable than a typical political prediction site.

My prediction is that companies up to 100 people (and some even bigger) will absolutely lose people until they are under 50 limit.

My prediction is that any company which lays off half or more of its employees at one go, for any reason, is not long for the world, and is probably not a place where people want to keep working if they have any reasonable alternative. I also predict that any company which would lay off any significant portion of its employees for the reason you give is and will continue to be a hellish place to work regardless of what the Supreme Court decides.

I also predict that any company which would lay off any significant portion of its employees for the reason you give is and will continue to be a hellish place to work regardless of what the Supreme Court decides.

Most companies are hellish places to work, without regard to this issue.

If they can. We're talking about 51-100 employee companies here, not IBM spinning off Lenovo.

And again, any company that would do this to avoid complying with the (very reasonable) requirements of the PPACA is run by idiots or ideologues, which means that (a) it probably won't last very long anyway, and (b) will be a distinctly unpleasant place to work during the time it has left. If you work for such a company, you should start looking for a new job ASAP.

if a company can't afford to take this kind of blow, then they are over extending themselves in the first place.

Ever hear of the cure of Home Depot install contracts? a small 5 man operation signs up with HD for install contracts thinking it will make a nice easy income stream... then HD starts sending you more work than you can handle so you grow fast....but your growth is not organic and your costs start going crasy and your QA sucks because you have to sub out so much work that you cannot vet everyone...

Oh, yeah, right, I forgot, you are the moral authority on the kind of businesses that people can still run in USA, you are the 'decider', figuring out who has the right and who does not have the right to run a business

You've got the right to run whatever business you want. You also have the right to run it out of business through malfeasance (throwing a temper tantrum and destroying the company so you can "show them"). We have the right to point and laugh.

I don't think they'll delay it, as that would be a bit too irresponsible. The individual mandate goes into effect in 2014, and the longer businesses are unsure of which way it will go, the worse off we are. Uncertainty is almost never good for encouraging businesses to hire. The court wants to make their decision and give congress and the president as much time as possible to try to pass new laws to save the bill.

I do find it interesting that they could have crafted it to have almost the same effect while h

Scotus will most likely delay the decision, it's election year, and Obama has ways to pressure them

OTOH, some of them will see it as a way to strike a blow against the evil Democratic Administration.

but Republicans will have to show their base they are not signing under the mandate being constitutional (and it's not), so it's most likely to be delayed.

Their base (if by "base" you mean all the non-rich social conservatives that they've suckered into working for them) wouldn't have ever cared a fig about the mandate, if their pwners hadn't told them too.

And those pwners kind of screwed up, because their real base - rich people - *want* the mandate, because it will drive up the net worth of the health insurance industry. They just don't want the consumer pro

Single payer is the goal, and severing the individual mandate is part of that. The only question is why severability wasn't expressly part of the law, since the outcome of severing the individual mandate would collapse the insurance industry inside of a year - if they are mandated to cover "pre-existing" conditions, then there is no incentive for anyone to buy insurance before they are diagnosed with one.

Hahahah, "unintended" side effect. [...] By not making the individual mandate severable, they seem to have unnecessarily risked the possibility that the entire law will be stricken, resulting in an opportunity for sanity to prevail.

OK, maybe it was intended... though I'm reluctant to credit the Democrats with that much savvy.

I [hear] of people with good health care benefits have the insurance co trying to find ways to get out of paying out when some one got sick.

I've had some medical adventures lately, and my insurance has tried several times to get out of paying as much as they are supposed to. Some auditor half-way across the country will decide that your doctor kept you in the hospital longer than necessary, or they'll send you a "this sounds like an injury" letter, full of questions about who was responsible, did it happen at work, etc.... even when the problem is something that couldn't possibly be the result of an injury.

Why pay all the premiums when you can just sign up when you're diagnosed and get everything paid for.

That's no different than the current situation when people wait until they need emergency treatment, then don't pay for it. SOMEONE still pays for it.

Of course, the premiums would have to rise to the point that it doesn't make sense to bother buying insurance even then. Then, NO ONE will have insurance, so we'll have to do something, and single payer is something, so we'll have to do that.

Single payer isn't the only way to address the cost of health care, and it has a lot of problems too. A lot of people just don't want the government to have that kind of power. Imagine if instead of giving everybody Social Security checks, the government never sent you money but let you select products and services from a catalog that they controlled. That wou

Scotus will most likely delay the decision, it's election year, and Obama has ways to pressure them

Really? What ways in particular? How is the president able to force the scotus not to act? Are you aware of how the three branches of government work in the US? Do you have any idea what you're talking about in general?

Republicans will have to show their base they are not signing under the mandate

Which they came up with...

being constitutional (and it's not), so it's most likely to be delayed.

Newsflash, dippy. The scotus exists for the very purpose of deciding the constitutionality of laws (as well as some other key functions). Thankfully you are not on the court.

But a more important prediction: if/when this act goes into effect expect many of the companies that have maybe up to 100 people all of a sudden lose half of their employees so not to go over 50 employee maximum after which they have to comply with various provisions.

Thank you for demonstrating so clearly that you have no idea what you are talking about. You might as well predict an invading herd of chupacabra to lay siege to Washington DC.

Based on everything I've read and heard, and all the information I currently have at my fingertips, my prediction is I just got a first post. That's right. I'd like to share this one with the big man himself, Jesus. I couldn't have done it without him. First post for Jesus. Shout out to my homies.

They may, however, decided that since the mandate isn't a tax, and it's only justified under the Commerce Clause, that we've been misinterpreting the Commerce Clause for a few decades. THAT would enable them to chuck... well, practically every piece of legislation for the last 50 years, including the Civil Rights Act.

No side is saying the mandate it is a tax there are other portions of the law that are taxes and also raise existing taxes.
If it was a tax you would not have this situation.
When it is struck down it will be written up as a "special case" and use other terms that were given as a reason somthing this major takeover should be allowed. If by some reason it is allowed they will also use the same term to place some limit on why the federal government now does not have the abaility to dictate everything you buy

killing the mandating part may lead stuff out side health care being challenged in the courts. Like maybe like SOME to ALL taxes, homeowners and auto insurance.

City water and sewer fees (why can't I do it on my own and not be forced to pay)

workers comp, unemployment.

and other stuff

No, this is a pretty empty argument. Congress clearly has taxing power, and that power is itself limited clearly in the Constitution (in short... Congress just can't lay taxes for anything they please). Nowhere in the Constitution, however, is there the power for Congress to make you buy goods or services from third parties. To glean this power from the commerce clause would be to make the commerce clause supreme over the rest of the Constitution as a whole . What's funny is that If Congress had simply pass

Nowhere in the Constitution, however, is there the power for Congress to make you buy goods or services from third parties

The 2nd congress and president Washington evidently had a different idea about that, at least regarding firearms and associated equipment.

"That each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is herein after excepted) shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia...That every citizen, so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch, with a box therein, to contain not less than twenty four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of power and ball; or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch, and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder

Though as far as I can determine, any penalty for not following that directive is not specified in the law.

I doubt that the cost will come into consideration. The case wasn't argued on the cost basis to insurance companies or doctors/providers. If it were up held because of cost concerns to change the regulation that would set a very bad precedent because then anything rule or regulation change that incurs a cost to an individual business or person could then be struck down.